CAROLEE BENNETT SHERWOOD

november poem-a-day, day 2

My temptation is to keep poking at this one (ending, for example after “afterlife”), but I finished it minutes ago at a soccer scrimmage, and I am resisting further tinkering. Real revision is a task for another day.

I combined the autopsy imagery with — no surprise! — relationship stuff. I was determined to go somewhere else this month with the poems, and I still hope I can, but this is what came out for today. Already, I am finding myself thinking about how these will or will not fit into a chapbook manuscript, but I know it’s too early. I just need to let them be and worry about that afterward.

REMOVED FOR EDITING.

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“He won’t come to me anymore than you do.
Farther along the road, where someone dumped trash,
the twisted plastic claw of a rake reminds me
of the half my rib cage you’ll win back
in the divorce. Better to split myself up now,
for all the world to see, than to let you.”

This reminds me that I once watched an autopsy for real – not on TV. It was a long time ago, I had almost forgotten.
Like Donna, I found “The twisted plastic claw of a rake” a particularly striking image